Cauldron Full of Love
by haraguo
Summary: Celestina Warbeck. It's a hefty name for a slip of a girl, sure, but one day Celestina was sure she would grow into it. For now, it would hang over her head like an ominous cloud, heavy with a misplaced Fate. Semi-SI into Celestina Warbeck, AU, eventual Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr./OC, trigger warning: racism.
1. Prologue

**prologue.**

* * *

><p>Her parents didn't want a baby, not after the first… mishap. No, Jack Warbeck and his well-to-do society wife Mary Warbeck did not want any children, thank-you-very-much. But years of seeing their friend's and neighbor's children run amok, lively laughter and joyous smiles, the Warbecks were persuaded into trying it again, so to speak. And under an auspicious sun on August 18th, Celestina Warbeck was born into a family of two.<p>

Her mother, Mary, was a failed Muggle actress married to a wizard. Jack Warbeck, precariously proud wizarding member of the Muggle Liaison Department, met Mary when he dashingly saved her from the grasp of a monster onstage, to quote Mary when retelling the story to Celestina.

What Mary didn't know was that the monster was, in fact, a highly dangerous Magical creature known as the Lethifold.

This is all the Wizarding World knows of them:

_"The Lethifold, also known as a Living Shroud, is a carnivorous and highly dangerous magical creature. It is also considered a Dark creature because of its aggressive and violent nature._

_Its appearance resembles that of a black cloak roughly half an inch thick, although it gets thicker if the Lethifold has recently ingested a victim. It glides along the ground and other surfaces in an unknown form of locomotion, in search of its prey, humans. The Lethifold attacks its prey at night, when the target is asleep, by suffocating and digesting the human in his own bed._

_The only form of protection against a Lethifold is a Patronus Charm, as other such defensive spells will not work against its thick skin._

_Presumptions upon such a volatile and dangerous creature have been made, such that it is possible that the Lethifold could be a hybrid or a relative of the Dementor, for their similar descriptions, inhumane behaviours, and vulnerability to the Patronus Charm. If this hypothesis is true, then it must be that a Lethifold is a non-being, an amortal creature that has never been alive to begin with and cannot truly be killed."_

Jack Warbeck, aforementioned member of the Muggle Liaison Department, saved Mary from such a life-threatening being when the Lethifold, previously disguised as a stage curtain, moved to attack Mary in the midst of her performance. It was pure luck that Jack had been watching Mary's stage debut in the States, being an avid lover of Muggle lore and vacations, and so it was that Jack had saved Mary's life. From then on, it was a story of true love- Jack met Mary, Jack saved Mary's life, Mary fell in love (rather, at that time, lust) with Jack, Jack reciprocated, and thus Jack and Mary became a couple.

This version of the events has been told to a young Celestina Warbeck many a time as a bedtime tale: her father, the dashing hero, and her mother, the damsel in distress. The truth of the "happily-ever-after" was that Jack had, in fact, Obliviated all the nearby residents of the theater in his haste to clean his messes after he Banished the Lethifold from Mary's presence. Jack, at the time, was not quite handy with the Memory Charm.

_"Note: If performed improperly, a Memory Charm can erase significant portions of an individual's memory and cause brain damage, with difficulty in recovery."_

And it was with a major case of brain damage that aspiring actress-to-be Mary Pickford agreed to marry Jack and take on his surname, now and forever, and quit her career to become a housewife and commiserating society lady. Years later, Mary would recover from her neurological illness and find herself saddled with husband and child, and no famous, award-winning Oscars, and go into a state of delusion, believing the past forty years to be a lie. She would be committed to a mental asylum, and forgotten by the world till she died, alone.

But this tale is not about Mary Warbeck née Pickford, and her tragedy of a life well lost, but about Celestina Warbeck, born approximately seven years too late than Fate wished her to be, and her tragedy of a life both loved and lost. You see, there are many worlds that the deities must manage, many universe eons apart and somehow still almost touching futures. And deities are not without their own mishaps; what is a mistake but a small transferal of one lost soul into an empty vassal?

This is a tale about Celestina Warbeck, born of a time without magic, and yet born into a time with it.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter One. On Accidental Magic and Manipulated Opinion**

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><p>She was an odd girl, to be sure. That, everyone could agree on.<p>

The kids at school couldn't count on one hand her abnormalities. There were simply too many of them to keep track of; besides, who would want to waste their time counting all the things wrong with Celestina Warbeck?

There was one glaring error, however, that halted them in their tracks:

Celestina was black.

Oh, the teachers at school pretended not to notice. Rumor was that they were paid to ignore her fatalities by her father. But the kids knew. They knew that she stuck out of the white crowd like a sore thumb, her coffee-colored skin a distinct marker for anyone who might of been her friend. The color of it warned them away, you see, like how orange in the wildlife meant 'danger', black in the suburbs meant 'bad'. Celestina was, by her own nature, ostracized.

And not only was she black, but she was an Mulatto! Her mother was white! Why anyone would ever taint their honor by marrying a Negro was unknown. Mary Warbeck was a nice lady if you didn't know she was married to a black; she would've been alright if it weren't for that. Some said that she lost her mind, that her husband was cheating her (cheating on her was a popular variation, too, why have you seen the way he looks at Miss Williams/ Ms. Fisher/ Mrs. Atkinson/ etc.), abusing her, threatening her into marrying him, blackmailing her, doing something against her will to make her willfully marry him. No white lady in her right mind would ever do something as sinful as marry a black man, you know. She must of been bewitched.

Oh, Celestina was an outcast. But it wasn't just because of her skin. They swore that there was something—something—about her that gave them the creeps, like she could stare into your right soul when she looked at you, that if you said her name she knew, if you spoke one wrong word about her in the general vicinity of her, she'd retaliate—haven't you heard about Jimmy Shaw? They say that he badmouthed her once, and the next day, he was too frightened to speak around her! Something bad must of happened, she must've killed his pet dog, mauled his cat to death, no, did you hear about his uncle? Jimmy's uncle died the next week! She must've caused it, that Celestina is no good, you hear? Stay away from her, strange stuff happens when she's near.

She's a witch.

And so it was with a whimper and not a bang that Celestina's childhood went by. Plagued with racism and the occasional, foolish, taunts from her peers for being Mulatto before their friends got a hold of themselves and restrained the aspiring bullies from doing any damage (to themselves, that is), Celestina grew from four, to five, to six years old before anything of importance happened in her childhood.

A few months after she turned six, Celestina—most often called Celeste, by her father, "my little angel," he would say—lost her voice. She didn't speak a word for two and a half days, and those sixty hours were when the bullies came out of the wood-works. Without her voice, they thought, she couldn't speak her spells or do her nasty witchcraft on them. They were safe to beat her into the ground for being a devil's spawn, they thought. (They thought wrong. The sixty-first hour, each and every one of her tormentors fainted. They all woke up a day later, shuddering from fear. They never laid a hand on her again.)

What the town didn't know was that she didn't speak a word for two and a half days not on account of a sore throat, but the fact that Celeste, unwittingly, performed an Accidental _Sonorus_ on herself in response to an attacker cornering her in an alleyway when she was walking home from kindergarten.

_"Note: The Amplifying Charm is used to amplify the targeted sound, be it a person's voice or a piece of equipment. This charm is particularly useful for amplifying one's voice, although using it on oneself for a long period of time will result in hoarseness thereafter. When using the charm on an inanimate object one must simply point their wand at the device and either verbally or non-verbally incite the incantation. The counter-spell to this charm is Quietus."_

She screamed so loud that Mr. Judson, her drunken white attacker, went deaf from the decibel level. He passed it off as a broken bottle to his ears, so scared was he of Celeste's witchcraft. No, Celeste didn't speak a word for two and a half days not because of a sore throat but because if she did, every person in town would go deaf until it wore off.

That was when Celeste learned of her unnatural powers—Magic, her father called it.

Turned out that her father was a wizard. And he had purposefully held that important information from her, his only daughter! True, she was only six years, but she was his family, wasn't she? Family meant nobody got left behind or forgotten… right?

That was also the day she looked at her father in a different light; she no longer saw the easy-going family man, but more of a ruthless, tactically-strategic man who manipulated what others thought of him into his bidding. Celeste realized that he let the town judge him because that way, it was safe—they would only see the color of his skin, and not the Magic beneath it.

Celeste learned many things from her father, be it Magic or manipulation. She did not, however, learn how to keep a secret—for that she already knew.

Her father might control the town's opinions of him, he might command the Magic at his fingertips, but what he did not have a hold of was Celeste's secrets, hidden so far away into her conscious mind that even Legilimency would not be able to uncover it.

_"Note: Legilimency is the act of magically navigating through the many layers of a person's mind and correctly interpreting one's findings. A person who practises this art is known as a Legilimens. Muggles might call this "mind-reading," but practitioners disdain the term as naive. The opposite of Legilimency is Occlumency, which may be used to shield one's mind from the invasion and influence of a Legilimens._

_It is unknown who invented the art of Legilimency and just when it was invented. It is safe to assume that the art has been around for a long period of time, as Salazar Slytherin, a very skilled Legilimens, lived in the 11th century, and, along with the other Hogwarts founders, enchanted the Sorting Hat to have the skill. Other witches and wizards have used Legilimency on several different occasions as well._

_The most advanced Legilimens can perform Legilimency nonverbally and wandlessly, but less talented practitioners must use the incantation 'Legilimens' to enter their victim's mind. If a target is not skilled in Occlumency, a Legilimens will be able to detect if the person is lying, as well as delve into their thoughts, emotions, and memories. Highly skilled Legilimens can also influence a mind that they invade, proving the Art of Mind Magic dangerously lethal."_

No, Celeste was not an Occlumens, but what she was was so much more than that. You see, no possible Legilimens—save an immensely skilled one—could uncover her secrets because they were not merely hidden in her mind. They were her mind.

Say, for example, that one was looking for a particular thing in an immense mindscape. Something that stood out amongst the others, something that was protected with utmost care and responsibility—a secret. But if this one particular thing was not, in fact, singular, then how would one know where to find it? If this one particular thing wasn't a thing, and became more than that—became the entire mindscape itself—how would one know where to find it? Only the immensely skilled, impossibly observant, incorrigibly intelligent would figure it out.

So it is safe to say that Celeste's secrets were safer than gold in a Gringotts vault, yes. Safe enough that she can say this, confidently, assuredly, with no doubt in her mind (in her secret):

Celestina Warbeck was not from this world.

Now, you might be shocked, disbelieving, contemptuous of this claim—but let her say this. Her name wasn't Celestina Black six years prior (if one assumes that Celestina is saying this as a newly minted six-year old). In fact, her name was something totally different, her name was attached to someone totally different. She was someone totally different before she was ever Celestina Warbeck—ostracized—black—Magic.

Celeste remembered a different life, too, where the idea of something so ridiculous as Magic was considered presumptuous, childlike, insane. No, who needed magic when there was technology—modernized skyscrapers that reached the heavens—airplanes that traversed the earth—nuclear bombs that could wipe out countries. Those were complex times, she reminisced. Different from now, Celeste discerned, where the world was literally black and white, with a few shades of color in-between. In the future, where Celeste had previously hailed, racism was looked down upon by society. Now, where Celeste had been reincarnated of a sorts into a different world, racism was practically societal norm.

It made things different, that was for sure. Celeste remember a popular series in her first life, that detailed a world of Magic not unlike the world she lived in her second life. There was also a character—minor though she was—named Celestina Warbeck. That Celestina Warbeck was a famed "Singing Sorceress", renowned for her prowess in the Magical music industry. That Celestina Warbeck lived in a world with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and Albus Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort—

Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle, who would be her age, born in 1926. Tom Riddle, who would be her Hogwarts year-mate in 1938. Tom Riddle, who would grow up to be the most feared Dark Lord of his time, inciting both First and Second Wizarding Wars. Tom Riddle, handsome Hogwarts prefect, popular Hogwarts Head Boy, formidable Dark Lord, raging psychopathic man hell-bent on the destruction of both Muggles and the Boy-Who-Lived. Tom Riddle.

Celeste was, to be frank, completely terrified of her impending future. Tom Riddle was dangerous. Tom Riddle was a liability. Tom Riddle was smart enough, sly enough, cunning enough to figure out that Celeste was not from this world!

And it was thus that Celestina Warbeck, once Fated to be nine years before Tom Riddle's Hogwarts age, once Fated to be a popular idol in the Magical world, once Fated to be something this Celestina Warbeck would not be, became determined to be the best wallflower Hogwarts has ever seen. Celeste wanted to live her life like she couldn't before, after all. And being caught up in Tom Riddle's machinations for an imperfect, perfect world would be a lasting danger to her dream.

Suddenly, with the firm decision of a six year-old, Celestina Warbeck's Fate has been changed.

_"Celestina Warbeck (b. 18 August, 1917) was a popular singer in the Wizarding World. Celestina's musical talent was apparent even at an early age; Warbeck became justly famous as a singer in her later years, widely lauded as 'the Singing Sorceress' by her many fans."_

_"Celestina Warbeck (b. 18 August, 1926) is a famed revolutionist in the political party Knights of Walpurgis. Fiercely loyal to Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr., Warbeck became justly famous as a singer for his cause, swaying many followers to their side with her siren-like voice in her forced-broadcast propaganda-filled songs on the Wizarding radio. Some say that Warbeck was Riddle's school sweetheart, despite their icy relationship outside of their mutual business association—this has not stopped the two from being a political powerhouse."_


End file.
